


Nate

by Neriad13



Series: Explicit One-Shots [5]
Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Conflicted Android Desperately Needs to Go Outside, Confused pining, Existential Dread, F/M, Masturbation, Non-canon sexbots, Other, This turned into a lot of worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-06
Updated: 2018-02-06
Packaged: 2019-03-14 08:52:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13586610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neriad13/pseuds/Neriad13
Summary: A young synth is slowly becoming accustomed to the strange new world in which he has been thrust. As he sorts through his feelings about things and figures out how his own body works, he comes upon a set of memories that are not his own.This is a side story from the same universe thatN4-73is set in. If you like it, check it out!





	Nate

The tap on the door broke him out of his haze. With a start, he looked away from the screen to see pale sunlight peeking through the edges of the radstag hide tacked over the empty window frame. Another night gone, just like _that_. He rubbed his eyes and stretched, the old chair creaking under him as he scooched it out from under the desk. When he turned away from the searing green text of the terminal screen, the rest of the room seemed dark and formless, the unlit edges of his perception cloaked in shadows deeper than they ought to have been. Synths have no need of sleep. Their organic processes can run almost indefinitely without pause. They do not tire and they rarely relent once they latch onto a task. But there was something appealing about breaking up the march of days with long bouts of unconsciousness to N4. It added a rhythm, a greater sense of purpose to the quiet hours he spent locked away in the dark. On nights where he became so absorbed in what he was doing that he slaved away through the rising of the sun, he always felt as though he had missed something. He had no true experience of sleep deprivation, but going without always left him more restless and irritable than he had been before. 

But for now, he was afraid.

He faced the door and froze in his chair. As his eyes adjusted to the low light, he felt a rush of relief at the sight of the deadbolt, still securely locked. He had never once left it undone while he was inside, but his anxiety wheedled on constantly that this might not always be the case. He could feel _her_ standing there, just beyond the peeling door. Waiting. Listening. Not even realizing he was doing it, he slowed the vital processes of his own body down to almost nothing. His breaths grew shallow. His heartbeats were languid. Deep within him, non-vital organs and processes softly shut off. Had a doctor looked at him, he would have declared him to be at Death's door. It was a survival mechanism, meant for lasting out extreme weather or laying in wait for unsuspecting prey. It was a habit that N4 had fallen into when he did not want to be found, no matter how practical it was for the situation.

His blood started flowing again when he heard the sound of her boots fading away into the distance. His fingers and toes tingling as the feeling came back to them, he rose from the chair, tiptoed to the window, being careful to avoid the copious wires criss-crossing the floor and peeled back a corner of the hide. He was just in time to catch a glimpse of a blue jumpsuit rounding the bend that led to the bridge out of Sanctuary. His lungs kicking on again, he let loose a sigh of relief and turned to undo the deadbolt. 

The little blue cooler was in its usual spot, wrapped with a heavy chain that would prevent wild animals from getting at it, on the off-chance that he was asleep when the delivery was made. Using the chain as a handle, N4 hauled it inside, set it on the coffee table and turned to take the key off the hook beside the door. He was exceedingly careful to lock the deadbolt behind him before proceeding any further.

Today, there were two mirelurk cakes wrapped in a greasy napkin, a mutfruit and a cool bottle of nuka-cola, no doubt taken from the stash that was kept cold in the river beyond his backyard. He popped the lid off the nuka-cola, took a sip and ignored the rest. Synths didn’t need to eat either. On the surface, the energy of the Gen 3 models were synthesized from sunlight and the nutrients that they could absorb through their pores. In the Institute itself, they were given supplements to counterbalance the lack of either these things in the sterile environment. Humanity’s best hope would hardly be an efficient enough army if they marched on their stomachs like ordinary soldiers. But N4 enjoyed the sensation of flavor, the motion of chewing, the feel of carbonation as the bubbles slid down his throat. His sweet tooth especially, was a force to be reckoned with.

At the bottom of the cooler, there was a magazine. The bottom left corner of it had been smudged by the grease from the mirelurk cakes, but it wasn’t in bad shape otherwise. It was a fresh issue of Tesla Science Magazine, its cover decorated with grey-skinned, goggle-eyed creature pointing a fanciful laser pistol at the viewer. “LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS?!” the headline screamed, in loud, blood red letters. 

He smiled to himself, picked up the mutfruit and flopped down on the couch. About half of any given issue was unflinchingly factual reporting on the latest developments in pre-war tech. The other half was lurid speculation, with occasional foray into outright science fiction. 

It was a game he played with himself to tell the two apart. He was quite assured that gecko blood wasn’t a cure-all, that a Mr. Handy wouldn’t be smart enough to take over the world in the near future, that plasma was indeed a useful substance and that more military funding wouldn’t have turned the war in America’s favor. He was much less certain about things like the vastness of space. The first time he’d seen a map of the solar system, he hadn’t believed it for a moment. There was no way that such things were capable of existing - that there were balls of molten glass out there floating in an endless abyss, that the sun was 93 million miles away and would kill you before you even came close to touching it, that there were infinite amounts of galaxies and every galaxy holds the potential of billions of worlds and Earth is the tiniest, most infinitesimal piece of rock in existence and what is the Institute, what is _he_ to any of it and if it was true, then nothing could matter, but there _were_ things that mattered and so - Half a dozen articles on space travel and one book on astronomy later, it had begun to dawn on him that maybe this whole space thing wasn’t some lone sensational writer pulling the wool over his eyes. The thought of all of it existing as it was written terrified him like nothing else but slowly, he was starting to find his place in all of it.

There were a great many holes in his understanding of the world, some of them seemingly insurmountable from where he was standing. With every book he read and every holotape he listened to, there was still so little that he could grasp about the motivations of humans. Why create a sentient AI if you're not going to give it free will? Why destroy your own planet to spite an enemy that will share the same fate as you? Why shoot, when you might have asked questions first? However wide his gaps in understanding, there were also topics that he had innate knowledge on that surpassed that of most humans he had come into contact with so far. Reading had never been a skill he had needed to consciously learn. Finding out that humans could spend years learning to do so was something of a shock to him. And speaking. He could hardly imagine being thrust into the world without the means to communicate for long stretches of time, let alone lacking the muscle mass to move one's self in a timely fashion. English was not the only language he knew either. Exactly how far his skill extended, he could not at all say. Once, he’d been given a book with a Chinese-language propaganda poster folded up in the inside cover and to his utter shock, had found that he could read it, clear as day. At another time, he’d gotten a quarter of the way through a dense book of philosophy before he realized that "Existenzialismus" is not an English word.

All languages came easy to him - even the ones that had not come pre-packaged on the hard drive of his brain. Fortran, Cobol, Binary - they were all just other ways of speaking, no different from forming words or scanning the page of a book. He crunched through the thick skin of the mutfruit thoughtfully and narrowed his eyes at the glowing screen of the terminal on the other side of the dim room.

Even if he couldn't figure out where he was going wrong sometimes.

He set the nuka-cola on the table and slumped deeper into the sagging couch cushions. The drive to solve the problem that had kept him up all night was still there, raging beneath his skin, making him itch desperately to get back at the keyboard. At the same time, he was feeling faintly sick of looking at the thing. Maybe it would be best to set his brain on something else for a bit. Solutions often came to him in the small hours of the morning, as he drifted between unconnected thoughts in the dark.

He reached up to open the window a crack, slid the magazine onto his lap with his free hand and flipped it open, pausing to take another bite out of the mutfruit before continuing. He slurped at it loudly, trying to prevent the juice dripping down onto his reading material, before giving up and wiping his mouth on his sleeve. The cover article was centered on a few blurry pictures a probe had taken of Mars, which supposedly revealed the remnants of an advanced civilization. He tilted the article this way and that, screwing up his eyes until he saw only light and shadow - and still wasn’t sure what he saw. The lines were oddly geometric though. He had to give it that. Far more interesting were the fanciful illustrations of extraterrestrials that might have lived there. One was an amorphous pile of glistening, lime green slime with a pair of bulbous eyes floating in the mucus. One was more insectoid - some kind of a cross between a bloatfly and a bloodfly, near as he could tell. And then of course, there was an utterly ordinary human woman in a low-cut spacesuit, dyed an appropriately unearthly blue. 

He looked for the war correspondent's column next. It was plainly not a feature that was given much importance in the magazine. It was always somewhere else in every single issue and shrank exponentially as the date of publication grew more recent. He found it this time at the very back, barely taking up a third of a page, smushed between an advertisement for a working model atomic power plant (now with 5 grams of plutonium!) and a chemistry set (Today's adventures in Science will create tomorrow's America!) - and read the brief, but grim account from the front lines of Anchorage. He wasn’t entirely sure where Alaska was, but he knew enough from later issues that the situation he was describing was not going to end well for a lot of people. It gave him some comfort, in a magazine where every other issue spent copious amounts of space praising the technological achievements of the U.S. Military, that there was one writer on staff who had looked past that and refused to be drawn in to the myth of the flawless, glorious superpower, no matter how his editors chipped away at his wordcount. A tiny part of him hoped, for this man who had lived centuries before his birth, improbable as it was, that he’d been somewhere safe when the bombs had fallen.

His shoulders cracked as he set the magazine aside and stretched. He threw the mutfruit core at the wastebasket and watched it bounce off the edge disinterestedly. The rest of the nuka-cola he chugged while it was still cold, the flavor crisp, rather than syrupy. He put the bottle on the table with the rest and flicked the cap into the tin on the mantle. It was a pitiable fortune, but slowly and surely, it was growing.

Heavily, he plunked himself down in the computer chair once again and scooted it under the desk. Working straight through to noon, he figured out what he’d been doing wrong and became the proud owner of a from-scratch copy of Zeta Invaders with working collision. 

The graphics still needed a little tweaking (how do you get across that in this version, the Invaders are Institute goons, with twelve pixels to work with?) and the scorekeeper wasn’t quite functional yet, but as far as he was concerned, the game was nearly finished. He sat back and admired his work for a moment, basking in the glow of having done something right for once.

This called for another snack break. He eyed the mirelurk cakes warily, his nose wrinkling at the fishy odor that wafted from the cooler the second he dared to open the lid. Opting to contain the biohazard, rather than eat it, he shut it tight and headed to the kitchen. In the cabinet, there was one box of snack cakes that he hadn’t eaten yet. With great restraint, he pulled a single cake from the package and put the rest away. 

He flopped down on the couch again, propped his head up on a pillow, rested his feet on the armrest and scanned through the rest of the magazine as he ate. The remainder of the articles consisted of more practical information for the energy weapon enthusiast, a diagram for building your own enigma machine, an interview with one of the engineers who had designed a new type of vertibird and…

The last bite of cake turned to mush in his mouth as he tried to parse what he was seeing. It was a drawing of an assaultron, its frontal processors much bigger than regulation, striking a demure pose in lacy negligee. ROBOT LOVERS: THE FUTURE IS _NOW_ , the title of the accompanying article declared. 

_Relationship troubles got you down? Wife off on a trip to see your mother-in-law? Girlfriend gone away to college? Relief may be in sight! Insiders report that Robco is working **hard** on a new line of assaultrons designed for much more than war…_

_“…just plug and play, no batteries required!” our anonymous source informed us, with a laugh, “But really, we’re trying to implement a rechargeable battery that isn’t so heavy. Or prone to crushing our customers. It’ll be a long time before it’s ready for market.”_

_Imagine it: a gal that will never introduce you to her mother, won't beg for a credit card, needs precious little maintenance beyond a monthly polishing and fits discretely into a broom closet when you’re done with her. We know we’re excited for what Robco has in store! The future is NOW!_

He dropped the magazine weakly on the coffee table and stared up at the cracks in the ceiling. Was that how humans saw robots? Was that…what _she_ thought of him? 

His blood froze in his veins as he peered through the slats of an outhouse door in his mind’s eye and saw her rip the throat from a monster that had stood not a single chance against her. 

No. If _that_ was what she had wanted, wouldn't she have taken it already? Things Desired and Things Owned were not strictly separate categories with her. If she wanted something, she took after it immediately, whether that was the death of someone who had wronged her or a new piece of power armor locked away in the depths of a secret military base. It didn't make much sense that other matters would be much different with her.

 _Not that you would have minded…_ a soft, sibilant little voice curled through his thoughts.

His breathing function slowed and hot blood rushed to his cheeks as he thought about it. 

_No. I would have minded. Terribly._ he shot back at the voice, _But if it was my decision..._

_My decision..._

The thought felt almost sacrilegious. Imagine it, a synth having the power of _decision._

He closed his eyes and thought back on that day.

He thought she’d gone out on her usual scavenging run. She'd left the food and a book, as per usual. He'd watched her walk across towards the bridge, though he hadn't actually seen her cross it. Around midday, he'd spilled half a bottle of nuka-cola on his bedding and was despairing of the sticky mess he'd made in his favorite reading spot. The only thing for it was to drag the offending blanket down to the river and wash it as best he could, given the current lack of soap that plagued Sanctuary. He’d pulled it through the front door and was nearly to the river when...

There she was.

She seemed so small without her armor. He saw her ribs as she reached up to scrub at an armpit with a damp cloth. The parts of her body that were not typically subjected to sunlight were soft and pale. She was thigh-deep in the chilly water, covered in goosebumps as she scrubbed away, soapless until she could make another trip to Diamond city, but as rigid with her bathing routine as ever. Her damp hair trailed loose over her angular shoulders, clinging to her back like seaweed. He stared at it in shock, trying to reconcile the neat bun that fit under her helmet with the wild tresses that trailed like the hair of goddesses he'd read about. Aphrodite came to mind. Sif, Medusa... And then she'd bent down and ducked below the water, shattering the spell. His heart pounding, the taste of fear in his mouth, he’d spun on his heels and fled, only remembering the blanket the instant he slid the deadbolt closed.

She had not called out to him as ran, nor tapped on his door later that evening. A part of him wished she had done so, though more likely than anything, he would have curled up in a ball of shame if she'd ever brought it up.

His mind drifted back to that moment for weeks after it had happened. At the terminal, as he stared blankly into an impenetrable snarl of code. While he was half paying attention to a passage in a novel that bored him. When he laid in bed and tried to quiet his thoughts, just for a little while, only to see her in their place instead.

He felt the familiar sensation of something inside him straining against the boundaries that held it. There was a noticeable bulge in the crotch of his pants. He reached down and rubbed his knuckles into it over the rough fabric. It brought some relief, though not enough to make it stop. _That_ was the one bodily function that he had much less control over. It annoyed him.

In the entirety of his short life, he had read exactly one erotic novel. He suspected that she hadn’t meant to give it to him - the dust cover had been that of a science fiction novel with some sort of space battle, not the period romance about a duke and duchess of an indeterminate country that it had contained. It was through this reading that he’d learned something of the mechanics of sex and made some sense out of his own wants, though the language used was overly flowery and difficult to follow at times. 

He rubbed his knuckles in harder, his hips arching almost imperceptibly into the pressure. He saw _her_ turning around in his mind’s eye, her breasts like the pictures of Roman sculptures he’d seen in the artbooks she had raided a museum for, her mouth hanging open, an unspoken question on her lips. 

The nearest he could tell, sex was something of a game that involved both parties reaching some sort of intense finale that resulted in them both being driven near the point of exhaustion. At that part of the story, the book had completely degenerated into metaphors and become largely unreadable. How it was achieved and what was involved in doing so was a much foggier concept to him.

A spot of wetness had soaked through the crotch of his pants. He pulled his hand away and tried to relax. His cheeks burned with - want? shame? All of these feelings were so new, so _odd._. He didn’t know what to do with any of it. 

Would it go away…if he finished it?

He heaved himself off the couch and tacked the hide window covering shut again. Winching at the tug of the zipper, he pulled it down and undid the top button of his pants. Struggling, he pulled the tough fabric down to his ankles and kicked himself free of them like a cat that had stepped in something unpleasant. His underwear followed a moment later, dropping to his ankles much more easily. He stepped out of it, leaving it where it had fallen.

He felt so strange, standing there in the green glow of the monitor, nothing covering him but a threadbare sweatshirt, the chill of the autumn air touching places he'd grown accustomed to keeping warm. But the blankets on the couch still held his heat. He laid on top of them, the nest of homespun fabric rough against the delicate skin of his buttocks. He saw his _ploughshare? tallywag? nob? - were any of those the right words?_ \- standing at attention before him as he looked down, the tip tinged with pink, the veins curling subtly around the shaft. Feeling utterly ridiculous, shaking a little as he did so, he reached down and wrapped his hand around it. 

The palm of his hand was cold at first, but the surrounding pressure felt better than that of his knuckles. He tried different positions along the shaft, eventually deciding that a brisk up and down movement served him well enough. A thin stream of liquid spilled from the tip as he went along, easing the passage of his hand as he jerked it up and down. It was thicker than the excess water that his body sometimes put out when he had drunk too much nuka-cola and much different in color. A voice at the back of his head mumbled something about human biology, but it was quickly silenced by the flood of images in his head.

He imagined her stepping from the river, her body glistening with moisture, her hair clinging to her neck. She mouthed a single word. He strained to hear it, but it was lost in the burble of the river.

A strangled groan escaped is throat, an ugly, foreign sound that forced itself out of him as he squirmed on the couch, squeezing tighter, faster, his brain whirring to keep up, his cognitive functions breaking down left and right. 

There was no river. There were trees and green grass and an empty bottle of wine on a picnic blanket. He was on top of her, his elbows on the ground, his legs between her thighs. She was flushed and glistening with sweat, smiling in a way that he’d never seen before, as she looked him in the eye, mouthing the word, over and over.

_Nate._

_Oh, Nate..._

A sound that didn't know whether it was expressing pain or pleasure oozed through his clenched teeth as the pressure built to unbearable levels within him. His face was screwed up into an ugly grimace, his knuckles white around his tallywag. He was so close to being free of this feeling, just a few more and - 

He gasped and it was over. For half a minute, he forgot to breathe. He lay still on the nest of blankets, gazing at the cracks in the ceiling as parts of his brain clicked back on. With a groan, he sat up and wiped his hand on the soiled blankets beneath him. The thought occurred to him that it’d be safe enough to take them down to the river now. He slid off the couch, stumbling clumsily over the wires that made a tripping hazard of the floor and cleaned himself off. It felt good to put clothes on again, to feel protected against the chill by the shapeless windbreaker that had appeared on his doorstep two weeks ago.

The sunlight stung his eyes when he opened the door and the wind nipped at his ears. The dry grass crunched under his feet and strange flowers bloomed in the desolate backyards he passed. The thought of all the horrible things that lived in this world hovered at the back of his mind, but just for the moment, he could see the beauty of it.


End file.
